We need a single place to announce discussions about MediaWiki messages. Every now and then someone wants a change to a MediaWiki message, say MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer. Then the normal thing to do would be to discuss the suggested change on its talk page. (And perhaps add {{editprotected}} if the user is not an admin.) Problem is that there are lots of MediaWiki messages, and each of them is only watched by a few or no users at all.

It would be nice to have a central page that we who are interested could watch. But having all those discussions on a central page would probably be too crowded. So I suggest we mostly use the central page to just announce the discussions (link to them), but we keep the discussions on the talk pages of the respective MediaWiki messages.

We have the {{interface explanation}} at the top of many MediaWiki talk pages. We can add a link to the central announce page in that template. We can also add a link in the editnotice that is shown for all "MediaWiki talk:" pages. That editnotice currently links to Wikipedia:Help desk and Wikipedia:Village pump (technical), which I think are bad choices for this. The Help desk is far to general, and the Village pump is to crowded.

Some companies, schools and ISPs have proxy servers that meddle with the connection between your browser and Wikipedia. This can make editing impossible. Connecting through the secure server can bypass such proxies.

European users are connected to the Wikipedia servers in Amsterdam. When the Amsterdam servers are down or unreachable, then European users can bypass the problem by connecting to the secure server, since the secure server is placed somewhere else (probably Florida).

Using the secure server gives some protection against eavesdropping, and most of all protects against others snooping your Wikipedia password. Eavesdropping is especially a problem if you connect over a wireless network. And there have been cases of schools complaining when students have surfed to the "wrong" pages. (Note that the secure server doesn't give you full protection, see more on that below.)

Some schools, companies and even entire countries have blocked Wikipedia. But sometimes you can still reach Wikipedia if you connect through the secure server.

Lately I have been working with sister project links (links to other projects like Wiktionary and Wikibooks). And I have worked with such links for the secure server. Thus I noticed that MediaWiki lacks the magic words to properly encode links between the projects. So I want to explain and discuss that here to get feedback from other editors before we file a bugzilla request for the new magic words.

When doing a link to say Wiktionary, we can do like this: "[[:wikt:Project:São Paulo]]" which renders wikt:Project:São Paulo, and like this: "[[:wikt:Project:São Paulo#São Paulo anchor]]". So far so good. But we can't do a link like this: "[[:wikt:Project:São Paulo?action=edit]]". And a link built by using "[[:wikt:Project:São Paulo]]" doesn't work as we want when using the secure server.

So we have to resort to using full URLs and encode the different parts. But the only good way we have to properly encode the page name is a hack, like this:

But we have no way to automatically encode query parameters. So we must ask users to hand-feed them and manually change every space in them to a "+". So we could have good use of a magic word like this:

We would have good use of templates that could take parameters like "page = Project:São Paulo#an anchor" or "page = Special:Search?search=São+Paulo&ns0=1". But there is no way in template programming that we can split up the pagename and the anchor or query part. So we currently can't encode those links. This means our templates have to take the data as two parameters, like this:

Note that the magic word should not translate namespace names to local names, so it should not change "Project:Page" to "Wikipedia:Page" when on Wikipedia.

If we had the two magic words {{queryencode:}} and {{wikilinkencode:}} then we could do the rest in template code to handle pretty much any kind of sister project links and secure server links. Those two magic words don't depend on what project they are on, or what server they are on, they are just string conversion functions. So I guess that they can't be to hard to implement in the MediaWiki software.

Of course, the ideal would be if the wikilink handling was updated so it could take query parameters, like this: "[[:wikt:Project:São Paulo?action=edit]]". And so that link would be a secure link if on the secure server. But that is probably a lot more coding. And as I said above, if we get the two magic words described above, then we can do the rest in template code until the wikilinks have been updated.

And in case anyone doubts that, I have already done almost all of that in template code. See {{sec link auto}} and its sister templates, they are fully functional and already used in some interface messages, the Main Page and thousands of other pages. Only thing is they can't automatically encode the query links which prevents several usage cases, and we currently have to feed the anchor and query parameters as separate parameters.